BOSTON – Americans for Peace and Tolerance/On Campus today released a video documenting Northeastern University faculty members abusing Holocaust Remembrance events for political purposes. Northeastern professors and their invited guest lecturers are seen comparing Israelis to Nazis and denying Jewish peoplehood – on tape recordings and in internal emails. Some making these claims were invited by professors holding the Stotsky Professorship in Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies, established specifically to study the genocide of European Jewry.

“Northeastern is a popular and respected school,” said APT President, Charles Jacobs, “but there does exist a problem - mostly confined to a few anti-Israel radicals among the professoriate and the administration. These individuals have used a chair donated for the purpose of teaching students about the genocide of European Jews to demonize and delegitimize the state of Israel and its supporters.”

Jacobs said, “It is extraordinarily unscholarly, insensitive and hurtful for university professors to invite speakers who tell Jewish students in front of their classmates that Jews today act like Nazis. It is outrageous that somebody who denies Jews the right to self-determination and compares the Jewish state to Nazis is responsible for commemorating the Jewish genocide.”

“It is also very troubling,” he said, “that some Jewish faculty members are too intimidated to speak publicly about these issues, and that some Universities use ‘academic freedom’ to shield bigoted professors who defame the Jewish community.”

Jacobs said he is encouraged by recent efforts by the administration and he hopes that bringing public attention to this problem will lead the administration at Northeastern to comply with its own policies in its treatment of all minorities on campus.

APT/OC is calling for three specific actions:

The University should apologize and launch an independent investigation into how such demonization of Israel and the Jewish community could have occurred on campus.

The University should form a new Holocaust Awareness Committee composed of faculty sympathetic to Jewish peoplehood.

Professors who claim that Jews act like Nazis are engaging in hateful bigotry. To prevent such bigotry in the future, the University should extend its existing minority sensitivity training programs to include the Jewish people.

APT/On Campus is an interfaith group educating the public about the radical threats to academic integrity at America’s Universities . In particular, APT on Campus works to increase public awareness of the growing hostile campus environment currently confronting Jewish students (and others) who support Israel.